I have never considered myself an especially typical man. But my heart surgery has – not for the first time – left me wondering what it means to be a man.

Gender comes up frequently when it comes to hearts, surgery and health. There were very few women in the cardiology ward or the ICU. The doctors, nurses and staff were almost continuously making references to men and how they react to things, accept things, foresee things. Phrases like “typical man,” or “typical male thinking” were common. There were men all around me, most were lethargic, depressed, uncommunicative.

Like me, all of them were stunned to be facing open heart surgery, to need it or undergo go. At one point a cardiologist asked me why it was that a thoughtful man like me had not had his heart checked in 30 years. “I don’t  honest know,” I said. “Typical men,” he said. A nurse who came to visit me asked me what my symptoms were before the surgery and I said I felt some heaviness in my chest and shortness of breath, but I just thought I was getting older.”Typical male,” she said.

I didn’t take it as a compliment. What is a typical man, and I am I one, and is my sense of myself as  man the reason I nearly died taking one of those walks? I am not a macho man, I can hardly bear to look at sports, I have few male friends, have never had a beer and have never been considered one of the guys. I blame men for most of the awful troubles in the world and hope I see the day when women take over and hopefully save us.

Why didn’t I have my heart checked? I guess I don’t know. I have always found conventional medicine confusing, corrupt and disturbing and in most ways I still do. Medicine is corporate, money-driven, remote and insensitive, if I did all of the things my doctors suggested I would have no life beyond pharmacies and insurance forms.

I think the male disease is more benign, it has more to do with a sense of obligation, responsibility, stoicism, this is what we are taught, this is what we see around us. Men can be very brave if you count going off to war an act of bravery – I do. But they often life in their own reality, closed off to other ideas and feelings. Just look at cable news. Men rarely open up to one another or to anyone, if I had talked openly about how I was feeling to my friends, one of them might very well have urged me to get to a doctor, I was feeling many of the symptoms of a struggling heart but recognizing none of them.

In the hospital, I saw man after man, quite alone, down and low, staring at the TV, unwilling to get up and walk or move. Those that did talk spoke of the agony and disappointment of getting old, there is a big ego blow to having open heart surgery, it can bring you down as hard as a broken vessel. They did not seem old to me, these men, they seemed broken in spirit.  They were angry, complaining, as if their bad hearts were a wicked blow, dealt them by the fates, even as they could no longer walk down their driveways. They broke my heart, I do not wish to be one of them, I am not one of them.

I believe there is a great sickness in our country about aging. I hear it every day in what I call “old talk.” At the dump yesterday, a man older than me came up to me – I know him – and slapped me on the back. He had obviously heard about my surgery.

“Well,” he said, “I guess we won’t be eating any green bananas will we?” I hear this “old people” talk all the time. It is demeaning and crippling to my ears. “At our age. When you get to be our age. Well, we’re not getting younger,” etc., etc., you know the drill. Old talk nearly killed me.  I thought I was just getting old, that explained why I could no longer walk up a hill or walk 100 yards on a flat surface. When the doctors talk to me and look at me, they shake their heads as if I am dumb and clueless. I suppose that’s fair enough. I was dumb and clueless. I will challenge it when I hear it from now on, and ask that it not be used around me.

If you can call bypass surgery lucky, then I am lucky.  I never had a heart attack, my heart is largely undamaged, and that might very well heal in time. I think often about what it means for me to be a man. I believe it means being loving, supportive, nurturing, strong when necessary, I want Maria to lean on me, I want to be there for here. I want to be a good friend too. I don’t believe in telling other people what to do, I will not badger other men and women to get EKG’s if they do not ask me, I will surely share my feelings about if if they ask.

I think I am learning that being a man means loving me as well as others, loving my heart, my life, the time I have left in the world. I am nowhere near too old to walk up a hill,  I am now doing it every day, a week out of bypass surgery. I am reminded not to speak poorly of myself, my work, my life, my age. My heart was listening.

Did this happen to me because I am a man? I think in some ways that is true, that is so, the doctors and nurses see it every day, all day. I can’t walk away from that. They saw it in me, for all my smugness and pretense.  I will think on what it means to be a man, and why being a man failed me at so critical a time in my life. Men need friends, I will try and be a good one. Everything is a gift, there are few things more beautiful than being a man with a heart.